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GRTV News - Steam launches its Families game sharing system
Steam Families is the new way to share games with those you hold close.
Audio transcription
"Hello and welcome back to another GRTV News, I'm Alex as usual covering the afternoons latest and greatest from gaming, gear, technology, whatever you like, whatever you love, we always have it here for you at GRTV News and in the wider Gamereactor Network as a whole, so if you like what you see and you want to see more be sure to check out Gamereactor wherever you get it from for more gaming reviews, gaming previews, movie reviews and so much more."
"Without further ado though today we've got a bit of Steam news for you, basically Steam is changing the way that you can game share systems, changing the system that you game share with and now it's introducing the families, Steam families, which is going to be a new system that basically means that you will no longer sort of share games in your library between one user, you can share them with up to five users and all have this one massive sharing library. This sounds great right because obviously not many people have mother and daughter and father and son Steam accounts that they would willingly share so you're more thinking well how can I make this sort of exploitable with me and my friends, with six of us we could get loads of these damn accounts and get all of our games shared."
"In one sense that does work because anyone in the family can look at your library and sort of play a game and you can play another one from another person's library. Valve uses the example of if you've got Portal 2 on one account and Half-Life 2 on another account someone can be playing Portal from one account and another person can be playing Half-Life from another account but you can't play the same game with two people. Unless of course there's local co-op naturally in the game. There's also a limitation on what games can be included so the developer will decide whether the game is going to be available for game sharing or not which kind of means that you can imagine that most developers probably wouldn't want the sort of exploit being available but we'll see as this is a very new thing, it's just been launched today, it was in beta for a while but we'll see. Valve obviously is going to allow all of its games to be shared and so obviously that's why they used the example of Portal 2 and Half-Life 2. There's also a limitation on sort of how you'll be able to access your games within the family. So if you leave a family or get kicked out of a family, which can happen, that means that you have to wait a year until you can rejoin or start a new family. So it's quite a big commitment really when you go into one of these families because essentially you're locking yourself in for at least a year from the date that you leave the family. So it's not even a case of, okay, well I joined this one a year ago and then I immediately leave it so I've got through another one. You're going to have to really sort of set your commitment up and make sure that these are the people that you want to be sharing games with. Steam is saying that they might sort of change the way that sharing will work because they do want this to be a family thing. They don't want it to be sort of a, hey you and your friends can now share games. But if you do have family members or friends that you want to share games with, this is probably the best way to do it on PC as it does seem to be really good so long as the developers are willing. We'll just have to see how many developers are willing. Are you going to set up a Steam family? Are you going to try and use Steam families to share games with your friends?
Let me know all that and more and I'll see you tomorrow for some more GRTV news. Goodbye."
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